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Anna Sappington's first moments of fame when she was a young girl, living in a home full of pets she calls it a zoo. She grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, surrounded by a lush environment teeming with wildlife, and her father was an environmental scientist. One day, when she found a skip laurel bush, she named him Skippy and built him a habitat. Later on, she and Skippy appeared on the Animal Planet Special TV "What's to Love About Weird Pets?"
Nowadays a senior majoring in computer science and molecular biology, Sappington has been chosen for another prestigious honors: She's one of five Marshall Scholars. It is a science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, society, science, science, society, science and society.
"They have grown and expanded in different ways, but they're still kind of rooted in this natural dual life," she says.
An eye for genomic research
When Sappington came to MIT, it was right after her first summer internship at the National Institutes of Health, where she examined genes that could be related to increased risk of cardiovascular disease. It's been working with patients, and it's working in medical research.
When she was a first-year student, Sapphire spent the year at the Koch Institute, working with a graduate student to determine hepatitis B virus infection. The summer after that, she went back to the NIH to contribute to a different project. This one still involved human health data, but it was more focused on building a computational tool. Sappington helped develop an algorithm that would quickly calculate how similar two genomes or proteins were to each other, a technology that could be used to screen for different bacteria strains in real-time.
"I want to get my feet wet in all the different kinds of ways, and I can say that they can interact," she says.
Since her return from the NIH at the beginning of her sophomore year, Sappington has been working in Aviv Regev's lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She says Regev, a professor in the MIT Department of Biology, has had nothing short of an inspiration.
"She herself is just an incredible role model for the world of computational biology," Sappington says.
The main initiative of Regev's lab is an initiative called the Human Cell Atlas, which was recently named science's Breakthrough of the Year. It's like a layer on the top of the Human Genome Project, she says. They are working to identify and catalog the different types of cells, such as skin cells and lung cells. The need for cataloging comes from the fact that these cells have the exact same DNA genome, they have different functional functions, and therefore can not be identified by genome alone.
"Within a given tissue, like your skin tissue, cells are actually like a whole group of different molecular profiles in which they express their genes," she says. "So while the underlying genome is the same, there are all sorts of factors that make your cells express those genes – which turn into proteins – differently."
Because the human body contains so many different types of cells. Sappington works on data analysis as part of a team that is classifying retinal cells. It's a unique challenge, it says, because the retina has more than 40 different types of cells, all of which respond to disease in different ways. While still chipping away at human retinal cell types, his team contributed to a recently published retinal cell atlas for the macaque monkey. For her undergraduate research career, Sappington was named a 2018-2019 Goldwater Scholar.
Dancing, speaking, leading
Before coming to MIT, Sappington had never been involved in dancing. This is the first time the Asian Dance Team has had a show. After a few semesters dancing with ADT, Sappington also joined MIT DanceTroupe, where she found the culture to be creative, supportive, and incredibly fun.
"[I] just really fell in love with the community, and the general community of dancers at MIT, "she says.
Dance was not the only aspect of the arts and humanities at MIT that she loved. She is also a part of the Burchard Scholars program, which allows students with a particular interest in the humanities to explore that topic. After she took a linguistics class with Professor David Pesetsky first year, that field became her official humanities concentration. It is up to the next level of that class, which is based on syntax
"Essentially linguistics is the study of how language is a whole, and the underlying rules that govern it," she says. "It interfaces with brain and cognitive science, and even computer science, and how language is learned and acquired."
Outside of class, Sappington has also been involved with TechX, a student-run organization that is responsible for many of MIT's tech-related events, including HackMIT. Events also include the MakeMIT makeup, the XFair and the high school mentoring program THINK. After serving on and running an event committee, Sappington served as the overall director for TechX in her junior year. While she's no longer in charge, she's still grateful to be part of the team.
"The whole thing was like one big family. … Each committee has its own intercommittee with the event that they run, but then everyone else has to rely on each other, "she says.
Machine learning across the pond
After graduation, Sappington will be heading to University College London to earn MS in machine learning. Her goal is to explore machine learning in a context that is not biology, so that she can learn new and different approaches that she could later be able to biological challenges. The second year of the Marshall Scholarship will be at Cambridge University, where it will be a full year of research, potentially involving machine learning applied to health care or other biological issues.
Her ultimate goal is to find new ways to improve the quality of life. To that end, she wants to get her MD / PhD after the next two years in England. After volunteering at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston area, Sappington is pretty much where she can interact with patients while still being involved with computer science and biology. She's excited to move forward with the next chapter of her life – but when it comes to leaving MIT, she's got understandably mixed feelings.
"I think no matter where I would be going after graduation, it's bittersweet to leave the community that is the MIT community," she says.
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